Hustling the Right way — Give yourself “Permission to Hustle”
A story about the impact a group of professors created and how they overcame barriers in their own mindset.
In March 2020, when the world was shutting down due to COVID-19, nine professors of Indiana University were on a Zoom call, figuring out how to make an impact and help people get through this crisis. Most of them were experts in Entrepreneurship and wanted to take immediate action that can create maximum impact. However, as the call progressed, the skepticism of working within the constrained environment of a University was mucking their plans up. They found themselves frustrated in navigating the University processes and buried under details that were hard to resolve on a call.
Then, as if Athena spoke through one of the professors, Dr. Regan Stevenson said, “we’re entrepreneurship professors, we know how to teach this stuff, but now it’s time for us to do it. This is a time to act like entrepreneurs, we need to hustle if we are going to make this happen.”
If you want to see the definition of hustle, the professors whose research paper I am taking all this information from have provided a definition that goes something like this —
“An entrepreneur’s urgent, unorthodox actions that are intended to be useful in addressing immediate challenges and opportunities under conditions of uncertainty”
The mention of “hustle” was somehow magical. The mindset changed. They all knew what hustle meant — they had to get shit done!!
Permission to Hustle means Getting Stuff Done
When we give ourselves permission to hustle, it’s like saying now you have no excuses, you have to get stuff done. There are no processes that exist, you don’t wait, if you need someone else’s input, you call them right away. Even if it’s a bit inconvenient, everyone understands because you do it in the name of hustle. Everything is fair game now (not talking from an ethics perspective, of course).
Giving yourself permission to hustle is also changing your own mindset. You are taking full responsibility, your team now depends on you. When you take full responsibility, you can’t be lazy. You just get it done.
It also means you might not take the most optimized or the most efficient approach because you don’t have much time to learn new technologies or spend time figuring out what the best solution is. You just build using what you got and then optimize it in the future.
Permission to Hustle means Permission to Fail
This is an important one in terms of mindset. When you are building a company, failure is a daily occurrence. When you remove the expectation of doing everything perfectly or finding the best solution, you change your mindset and allow for mistakes. When you allow for mistakes, you do more and aren’t afraid of things going awry. In fact, you expect things will go wrong and are comfortable with it.
When someone points out the mistake, you don’t take it personally, rather you fix it and just move on, improving your product on the way.
To finish the story I was telling you about, the group organized an “Idea Blitz” where more than 150 students participated guided by more than 30 mentors. More than 90 ideas were submitted and some real solutions that had immense impact came out of this weekend hackathon. Real Heroes Need Masks and ReScaleMed are some of the most impactful initiatives that emerged from this Idea Blitz. Real Heroes Need Masks has donated more than 73,000 masks and has partnered with key PPE suppliers to supply much-needed equipment for medical practitioners.
Conclusion
When I was reading about this, I recounted several times I was in a group setting working on a project, and even if nobody was stopping me, I still felt like I needed permission from the rest of the group before doing something. This was more pronounced when I was working with people who were laid-back. I felt more comfortable working on projects when we had established that the end objective was to get stuff done, and how we did it didn’t matter much.
I guess that’s what we need in our life too. Try giving yourself permission to hustle, to get stuff done in your life. Don’t be too hard on yourself if you make a mistake. It’s alright to be wrong. Stop taking it personally. Be thankful if someone criticizes you. They are only helping you get better. Fix the mistake and move on.
References
Fisher, G., Stevenson, R., & Burnell, D. (2020). Permission to hustle: Igniting entrepreneurship in an organization. Journal of Business Venturing Insights, 14, e00173.
Fisher, G., Stevenson, R., Neubert, E., Burnell, D., & Kuratko, D. F. (2020). Entrepreneurial hustle: Navigating uncertainty and enrolling venture stakeholders through urgent and unorthodox action. Journal of Management Studies.
